Dwight Cass
11/01/2004
The subtle, somewhat snarky sapience of Samuel Johnson’s epigram is derived from the fundamental tension between the often bone-charring unpleasantness of a first marriage’s failure and the fundamental human desire for companionship. It resonates as strongly today as it no doubt did when he uttered it over two-and-a-quarter centuries ago.
As the norms against divorce have withered,
legions have decided that it is better to cut their losses than to endure an
unsatisfying union. While the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS), the
government agency that compiles data on marriages and divorce, does not break
out figures relating specifically to affluent Americans, it reports that, among
the citizenry at large, 43 percent of first marriages end within 15 years. Add
to this the pressures that affluence brings to bear on relationships, and our
unions are even more at risk.Indeed, the problems that arise in relationships between wealth creators and their spouses, and between inheritors and theirs, while very different, are often more than their marriages can handle. Whether the clashes occur over lifestyle or child-rearing preferences, money and estate planning or the expectations of extended families, the outcome is often the same.
Deuteragonists’ Dilemma
Those embarking on a second marriage after such an experience must feel some satisfaction in their own personal triumph of hope over experience. Not everyone meets the right partner, or musters the necessary courage. In fact, the NCHS reports that the likelihood a divorced woman will remarry has actually declined since the 1950s. Sixty-five percent of divorced woman remarried in that decade, while 50 percent chose to do so in the 1980s, according to the agency. (One significant cause of this, of course, is the decline in the stigma of divorce; another is the burgeoning of professional opportunities for women in the intervening decades.)
The quandaries that doom a first marriage and those that plague a second often differ, at least in part. The experience of the first marriage provides a better understanding of what one wants from a spouse and should help identify appropriate partners, while what therapists inelegantly call “relationship skills” should improve with age and usage. (Perhaps they do, although the world is full of serial monogamists who seem never to learn from their mistakes.)
But the altar is not a finish line; second marriages, and the second families they engender, require enormous amounts of care and work. The weaving together of children, stepchildren and stepparents is a challenge for all families; add to it the stresses caused by expectations about, and resentments over, lifestyle, philosophies about the use of wealth, and estate plans, and havoc can ensue.
The seam that remains visible where second spouses have sewn together their new families will always exist. Whether they fade and are forgotten like a well-tended surgical scar, or flare up at every turn like a bum knee in the rain, will depend on a myriad of factors, including, perhaps most importantly, what the new spouses learned from their first marriages.